By nearly any measure, Mr. Purple — a dedicated ascetic who lived in an abandoned tenement, got water from a hydrant, read by candlelight and kept warm with a wood-burning stove — is an odd symbol for a 24-story hotel with “spalike bathrooms” and a terrace swimming pool.

“The gentrification, the consumerism, it’s the opposite of everything he stood for,” said the photographer Harvey Wang, who began documenting Mr. Purple, whose birth name was David Wilkie, in 1977. “It’s just appalling.”

“Mr. Purple” is not an honorable tribute. Believe me, I would love for David’s legacy to be memorialized, and I’m happy that he achieved notoriety enough to be considered for exploitation by a midtown corporate property development committee. However, a fancy hotel bar is not the right vehicle. At best, it’s tone deaf.

In an email to us on Dec. 28, Mason wrote, "I only found out about this travesty [on Dec. 27]. He and I were not close, but this is horrifying and I've been sick to my stomach for the last 24 hours over it."

---

3) There's a lengthy investigation in the current issue of The Villager dated Dec. 31 titled "The dark side of Purple." Editor Lincoln Anderson puts together the activist's past through a series of phone conversations and an exchange of documents and letters with Purple's two daughters, step-sisters Jenean and Lenore, who say that their father sexually abused them while growing up in Australia in the 1960s.

Per the article:

Asked what specifically Purple did to them or had them do, [Jenean] said, “Oh, everything — that’s what we were about — our purpose. He trained us, with pornography magazines, films, comics. I read ‘The Kinsey Report’ when I was age 10.”

According to Australian court documents obtained by The Villager, Purple served a two-year prison sentence for the molestation charges at Long Bay Penitentiary in Sydney. (In a letter dated from March 1967, Purple proclaimed his innocence to the children’s maternal grandparents, "asserting that his second wife was not a fit guardian for his daughters.")

One of the daughters, Jenean, told The Villager that Purple himself was sexually abused by his mother as a child ... and that his mother was also a victim of "generational sexual abuse."

As The Villager concludes:

Hopefully, the two narratives can somehow coexist and inform: on the one hand, the story of a family that finally healed from domestic sexual abuse, and, on the other, a man who built a new life for himself — and a glorious garden — on the Lower East Side and left a lasting legacy of environmental consciousness.

The Adam Purple bubble has officially burst. What he did to his daughters was horrific, and his work building a few community gardens hardly makes up for the fact he was a convicted pedophile. We often try to overlook or minimize the sins of very talented people, as if the crimes of untalented people are somehow worse.

Look at how society treats predators like Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and, until recently, Bill Cosby. If they didn't have so much talent, fame and money I doubt anyone would rush to defend their offenses. Adam Purple is not much different, but will people now rush to defend the good things he did while ignoring the bad? To say he was complicated is to say it's OK to dismiss child abuse if you later do things that the clueless public -- who knows nothing about you -- thinks are cool. It's not OK, as his children have revealed; their pain and scars last a lifetime. The Villager almost tries to rationalize Adam's behavior by saying he was sexually abused as a child. Being abused as a child does not excuse anything, and not everyone who was abused goes on to have orgies with their own children.

The Gerber Group might want to rename the Mr Purple bar the Purple Pedophile. They were totally clueless when they appropriated Adam Purple's name just to sell burgers and cocktails. Had they spoken with Adam's children they might have found out what a monster he was. Instead now we know what clueless idiots they are.

Do we really need to know about this man's skeletons in his closet, after the positive things he had endeavored and accomplished; the "legacy" for which he was known during his lifetime and which his public efforts deserve? Ah, the Internet.

The point isn't whether we "need to know about Adam's pedophilia and child abuse, because now we do know since his children have come forward to talk about it for the first time. To disregard or ignore their words is to compound the damage that Adam did to them. At the same time, we can still appreciate and learn from the urban gardens that Adam built, but to make him some kind of a local folk hero now seems both foolish and ignorant. I encountered Adam many times, I knew he was very smart, and very quirky, but there was always something about him that put me on edge. Now we know the truth. He was a monster in purple clothing.

This points out the error of assigning credit/blame to an individual instead of to social forces. Adam Purple didn't invent gardening, and he didn't invent vacant lots -- he just put the two together at a particular place and time, as have many people the world over, before him and after him. Nothing he did in his life pardons him for these crimes.

January 4, 2016 at 10:03 AM - that's absolute nonsense, he drugged and raped a 13 year old girl. No one set him up. He drugged her and raped her and fled the country like the coward piece of shit he is. Polanski may well have been filming rape and snuff videos of hippy hitchhikers with the hollywood elites, those films were taken by LAPD and have never been seen since. Have you ever seen Sharon Tate's nude spread in Playboy? It is very very strange. Polanski remains a child rapist, convicted in court of law. That Hollywood will work with this child rapist is offensive. Why hasn't he been extradited? Law enforcement is so soft on this fucker. The story goes that hippy hitchhikers were being picked up and taken to the wealthy homes where they were then filmed being murdered and gang raped.

If the allegations being made against Adam are true, they are horrific and inexcusable.

However, I have a problem with a post-humus article written about someone who cannot defend himself or respond. The Villager did a similar hatchet job vs squatter activist Michael Shenker AFTER he died. Other than character assassination, what was the point of such articles??

It is absurd to say that we on the LES ignored Adam's past -- WHO would know of Adam's past or the past of ANYONE else in our community that accepts everyone? I admired and dug the Adam Purple that I KNEW, not David Wilkie, who may or MAY NOT have acted inappropriately with his daughters.

I think there is a high burden of PROOF when one is accused of something heinous like child molestation. It doesn't appear to be here....

because some poster 'offhandedly' said polanski being set up for unspecific reasons related to charles manson. my bs detector goes off when charlie's name gets pulled out. charlie is a programmed mass culture boogie man. interesting, though, there was a very very young girl named Ouisch in the Family, 12 or 13 absolutely beautiful, there was some strange game between her dad, who was some kind of christian pastor, and charlie, but she lived with the Family and participated in group activity that at that age can only legally be called drugged rape.

starting out 2016 right back where 2015 left off. thinking about a real rain to wash off the streets.

@2:35 PM "According to Australian court documents obtained by The Villager, Purple served a two-year prison sentence for the molestation charges at Long Bay Penitentiary in Sydney."

Did you not read The Villager article? Adam Purple was a convicted child molester. Is that not a high enough burden of proof for you, along with the corroborating statements by his own family, or would you like to see the pictures?

An ugly story all around. Adam's predatory behavior toward his own daughters is grotesque. I also think the timing is ugly. All this comes out after he's dead. I question why The Villager saw fit to publish this. Pageviews?

It's true that it's a shame this comes out when he's dead. That sick SOB should have been reminded of it every day of his pathetic life and should have been spit on everywhere he went. Just like Cosby, it's not good enough that he got away with what he did living in peace for so long.

To people asking why this is even an issue as the guy is dead..maybe the kids were tired of and sickened by the worship and idolization that often goes on when an icon at any level dies. Maybe it brought back bad memories. Ones they did not want to think about but were forced to after he died. When i posted this article on a thread a friend was tagged in on FB it was deleted and i was called a liar. People believe what they are comfortable believing I guess. Anyone on Adam's email list knows he has said some pretty shocking things as he got older and more paranoid. This was still quite a bad shock.

Lincoln Anderson wrote an amazing report, with the help of purple's family and memorabilia.

I knew purple since 1976 and both eve's and was totally clueless.I never met his children.

Steve Mason and Jenean submitted comments at the end of the article thatexhibit a humanity and understanding I am not capable of. I wish you both love and peace because you have earned it more than many of us who are here commenting.

Billsville: Plenty of people have been jailed on the basis of FALSE testimony, or haven't you ever heard of that? If the testimony came from a bitter ex-wife engaged in a custody dispute with David Wilkie, I would hardly call that PROOF of guilt.

I think that YOU would want burden of proof to be as high as the presumption of innocence in the event you found yourself accused of something as horrible as this.

My heart goes out to his daughters. Now that this info is known, I wonder if the hotel will finally change the name of the bar. They were so eager to cash in on his legacy, but this can't be the kind of legacy they want to be attached to.

Here's some history: Adam Purple may have been a gifted gardener- but he was a stubborn crazy loner misogynist of a man. In the late 1980's many of us in the Children's Liberation Community (the city daycare center run out of PS 122) knew his then partner Ann (Eve) and his young son Adam who attended Children's Liberation. Ann wisely left him to raise her son in an apartment with running water and heat. Sometime during the late '80s or early 90s Adam Purple was forced to move out of his abandoned building, which was slated for demolition to build low-income housing. The housing built is as cheap and ugly as it could get BUT there was a city offer on the table to rehouse Adam and move the entire garden across the street to another empty lot, and hundreds of people ready to volunteer- to move each and every rock and flower and recreate it at Adam's direction. But he would have 'none of it'. Negotiating was out of the question- because in his mind he was not an environmentalist. Adam Purple was an outsider artist in the vein of Howard Finster, the garden was his artform, his life was his performance.

@7:31pm: What is your issue here? His DAUGHTERS themselves have said it, and they are adults now. Australian courts operate on the basis of presumption of innocence (and you could have found that out from google).

If he was convicted and sentenced to jail, then a level of proof required by the law in Australia must have been met. This is about so much more than a "bitter ex-wife engaged in custody dispute."

Well, Anon. 8:59, this goes along with the image I have of him in recent years: a street-bum fishing in payphones for change. Not saying there wasn't another side to him, but your story fits the image I have of him better than the sainted Adam Purple people have recently been memorializing.

(Confession: I didn't even make it over to MORUS to see the exhibit about him, even though I live just around the corner.)

Also, was his partner "Ann" the Anna Magenta I remember seeing around the neighborhood and often associated with him?

First of all Lincoln did a thorough job with this story one of the best he has ever done for The Villager. I predict that it will win a small paper NY state journalism award this year. Second Adam Purple was CONVICTED of child molestation in Australia and his own children are the sources for Anderson's well researched article. How much more proof do you need ? I am glad his children and grandson, who obviously wanted this to go on the record, were courageous enough to contact Lincoln and I hope this helps them with the healing process which takes many, many years and causes psycological problems, for some their whole life. In prison the lowest form of scum is a pedophile and it seems Purple fits the description.This is a sad story all the way around and it is too bad it took so long for the truth to come out.

I wonder how he managed to get into the country. I remember there used to be a stipulation that you had to provide a "Good Conduct" report from your local Police in order to get a visa from the American Consulate or Embassy.

What you all are forgetting is that Adam Purple paid his debt to society. Perhaps creating that garden years later was another way he had of making amends. What purposes does it serve to bring up something so ugly, so raw, and likely decades old? The man is dead. Nothing can change whatever occurred between him and his family. Sometimes the abused need to move on with their lives. I know. I was also a victim of familial abuse. It is very, very hard to let it go, but you ultimately need to in order to improve your own mental state. You can't say that any of this U.S. "news" has any impact in Australia, so the victims cannot maintain that they are constantly reminded of Purple's "good" legacy. They had their say. Let the man's legacy remain complicated. Running him through the muck serves no purpose, I mean, other than to "soil" the name of the stupid bar, however, which I'm all for. Be careful who you exploit, Gerber Group.

@10:51: Why bring up something "so ugly, so raw, and likely decades old?" Is that like with Bill Cosby: nobody should bring up something so ugly about him because it's decades old?

The reason this is brought up about Purple is that it's new information, it's the proven truth, and it changes many people's opinions of him, even posthumously.

You say "The man is dead. Nothing can change whatever occurred between him and his family." Both statements are true; whether he was alive or dead, NOTHING can ever change what he did to his children. I don't think he should get a free pass and be sooooo admired when his life (and thus his legacy) are certainly tarnished.

It's not clear to me that the "victims" sought to bring this out; rather it appears Lincoln Anderson did the requisite journalistic digging to find out the WHOLE STORY. That's called thorough reporting. For all you know, Purple's daughters HAVE "moved on" to the best of their ability. If you suffered this yourself, I would think you'd be more sympathetic to others who have had this awful experience.

So true, 11:44. Speaking out takes courage. Why shouldn't the family speak out about this molester? Some people here think being dead excuses horrible behavior---just ignore it, etc.... so by that argument, we can't be aware of history's most notorious criminals, political dictators, etc. who are now dead but left a legacy that might still be reckoned with? a fact is a fact and he was a monster.

I am glad this neighborhood poseur has been toppled from his perch---and yeah, a big laugh on Gerber Group.

As for why drag his name through the dirt, there are two reasons that are immediately clear: (i) because the sick son of a bitch deserves it, and (ii) so people stop lionizing a pedophile. Hey, he had a green thumb. That's all well and good, but I'm sure there are a lot of family abusing child molesters with little hidden talents. I'm sure they are all special little snowflakes in their own way. But, he was a pathetic monster and a coward that turned his sickness against his own children. Anybody who thinks that any feat of botany mitigates that needs their head examined.

Also, paying your debt to society is when you get let out of jail. It does not redeem you as a man. What he did is irredeemable.

One other observation. Why was this only uncovered now that people are making a stink over a hotel bar? I understand that some feel strongly about these things, but in the grand scheme of it all, it's rather trivial compared to a monster not only allowed in our midst, but put up for years on a pedestal. Why was this not uncovered years ago?

@3:13pm: Ha ha ha ha ha! That was good! The only people Gerber group tries to "give back to" is themselves. They do what they think will make them $$$. I think the Gerber group has fully embarrassed themselves, and I will laugh heartily at their stupidity. It's like they stepped on a rake and hit themselves in the head doing it.

I did not know Adam Purple. In fact, I only heard of him upon reading his obituary. (I'm relatively new to the area, and I continue to learn the history.) Intrigued. I attended the memorial service in Sept. at the community garden on 9th St. and Ave C. People seemed to hold him with the reverence of a head of state or war hero. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I agree with previous posters on the idolatry front. This revelation makes me sick and sad and I hope that his daughters and family have found some peace.

Adam & both his wives were open to "free love", orgies, sexual experimentation. They did not hide this from the "community" & some engaged them. Articles were published on this topic. This was not a secret. Go to MORUS (Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space). They have a book titled, "The Life of Les Ego". You can find these articles in there and more, if you are so inclined. It seems that Adam is being held responsible for damaging his children but the mothers are not. They engaged in sexual acts that made the children uncomfortable and ashamed of, too. In The Villager Newspaper, the daughter states that she was in the same bed with the adults (despite the incestuous history) and was afraid that they were going to have sex. She in the same bed with them knowing this is what they do. There seems to be details that we, the outsiders, are unaware of and most likely never will know what really happened behind closed doors and why really, now Jenean is coming clean, if in case, that is what she is really doing.

@11:17, what is it you are trying to say? That Adam Purple is less guilty of raping his own children because the mothers also bore responsibility? That it was all Ok because he was into free love and this was just a big hippie experiment? Also, what is the point of the statement "She was in the same bed with them knowing what they would do?" Are you saying it was her fault? Or are you saying that it was Ok because she consented?

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